Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But _he_ was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit--I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable--he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail--his joints all seemed loosening--it was a figure to set off against Paul Preaching--the words he uttered were few, and sound--he was evidently resisting his will--keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. "He had been a WIT in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession--understanding the term in its worldly acceptation--with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities--the Jocos Risus-que--faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna.--By _wit_, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness.--O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like--as in the pasture--"forty feeding like one."-- The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. [Footnote 1: From "Poems of all sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653.] THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER